E311 | Nintendo Ousts GameCube from Wii U

By Adam Riley 09.06.2011 5

E311 | Nintendo Ousts GameCube from Wii U on Nintendo gaming news, videos and discussion

Remember the GameCube? Well, Nintendo has confirmed support for it has been dropped with Wii U. Despite the Wii console allowing for GameCube discs to be played and even the system's controllers to be used, the new Wii U console will differ.

Chances are that thanks to the new proprietary 25GB disc format being used for Wii U (no Blu Ray support confirmed so far...), the old GameCube discs, which themselves were a bespoke variety of media, are no longer compatible and the effort required to sort kinks out would not be worth the effort.

On top of this, details of the Wii U innards have been revealed:

IBM has announced that it will provide the microprocessors that will serve as the heart of the new Wii U system from Nintendo. Unveiled at the E3 trade show, Nintendo plans for its new console to hit store shelves in 2012.

The all-new, Power-based microprocessor will pack some of IBM's most advanced technology into an energy-saving silicon package that will power Nintendo's brand new entertainment experience for consumers worldwide. IBM's unique embedded DRAM, for example, is capable of feeding the multi-core processor large chunks of data to make for a smooth entertainment experience.

IBM plans to produce millions of chips for Nintendo featuring IBM Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology at 45 nanometers (45 billionths of a meter). The custom-designed chips will be made at IBM's state-of-the-art 300mm semiconductor development and manufacturing facility in East Fishkill, N.Y.

The relationship between IBM and Nintendo dates to May 1999, when IBM was selected to design and manufacture the central microprocessor for the Nintendo GameCube™ system. Since 2006, IBM has shipped more than 90 million chips for Nintendo Wii systems.

"IBM has been a terrific partner for many years. We truly value IBM's commitment to support Nintendo in delivering an entirely new kind of gaming and entertainment experience for consumers around the world," said Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director, Integrated Research and Development, at Nintendo Co., Ltd.

"We're very proud to have delivered to Nintendo consistent technology advancements for three generations of entertainment consoles," said Elmer Corbin, director, IBM's custom chip business. "Our relationship with Nintendo underscores our unique position in the industry -- how we work together with clients to help them leverage IBM technology, intellectual property and research to drive innovation into their own core products."

Built on the open, scalable Power Architecture base, IBM custom processors exploit the performance and power advantages of proven silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. The inherent advantages of the technology make it a superior choice for performance-driven applications that demand exceptional, power-efficient processing capability - from entertainment consoles to supercomputers.


Are you disappointed at the lack of GC support, what are your thoughts on proprietary 25GB discs, and is the news of IBM's support positive?

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Sonic_13 is offline. Sonic_13 09.06.2011#1

I'm not surprised by this. It's always great to have as much backwards support as possible, but there does come a time where it simply cannot be supported any longer.

I wonder if GCN games will be downloadable via Wii U Virtual Console now.

 
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RudyC3 is offline. RudyC3 10.06.2011#2

The Wii CPU and GPU were 100% compatible with GameCube, so if Wii games are compatible, GameCube should be too, no matter if the Wii games will be emulated on the hardware, or if the original wii hardware will still be present in some form in the innards of the Wii U. Or it could be that the IBM cores used in the Wii U can run Wii (and thus GameCube) code too, who knows...

I doubt it could be the disks, Wii disks are basically an extension of the GameCube disk format (wii disks just have a longer header to add support for more than one partition I think). If it's compatible with the most recent, it's automatically backwards compatible with the oldest, as long as the software created to drive the hardware is rendered capable of handling it.

I doubt we'll ever get a good reason for them to drop support for that. Maybe they didn't want to continue to produce memory card ports (since memcards are already hard to come by without having to rely on Internet to find them) and Gamecube ports. Maybe they wanted to save that space inside the console to keep it relatively small (which the units at E3 seemed to be)

( Edited 10.06.2011 00:12 by Kafei2006 )

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bornforthis43 is offline. bornforthis43 10.06.2011#3

This doesn't make any sense to me. The gamecube's specs are so similar to the Wii's.

 
jim (guest) 10.06.2011#4

Had to get rid of it some time, the GC ports are wasting valuable space and i doubt many people use them

Stulaw is offline. Stulaw 10.06.2011#5

Guess it's to do with keeping costs down, I mean although it's probably fairly cheap to produce, they probably have to find the most efficient ways to save costs.

Not only that, it's not unusual for Nintendo to drop support from consoles more than 1 generation ago, they do it with the handhelds all the time.

The GBA had GB and GBC support, But the DS only had GBA support, and the DSi and 3DS don't support GBA games at all.

 

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